Źščļņīćšąä.šó / Źīķņåķņ-ńåźšåņū

Romanticismā™s equivocation over knowledge by attempting to carry
Kantā™s ā˜transcendental methodā™ into his explorations of art and reli-
gion. It is the conļ¬‚ict between the foundationalist direction of Kantā™s
method and the epistemically decentred objectives which Coleridge seeks
to fulļ¬ll with regard to the roles of imagination and will, art and faith,
which eventually break the back of the Biographiaā™s forecast ā˜deductionsā™.
By ļ±ļøļ±ļµ, encouraged by Kantā™s own introspective and psychologistic
account of synthetic a priori knowledge, Coleridge was full of optimism
that the transcendental method would usher in a new foundationalism,
one which would confer epistemic legitimacy upon the creative activity
of mind and of free expression in the arts. Even more so than Kant,
he saw the problem of the justiļ¬cation of synthetic a priori propositions
as a problem about causation, as a question concerning the relationship
between a ā˜subjectā™ and ā˜objectā™. But while for Kant epistemic creation,
the transfer of legislative power from object to subject meant the sur-
render of ā˜transcendentā™ grounds of knowledge for transcendental surety,
Coleridge believed that the German philosopherā™s linking of transcen-
dental method with creativity offered the prospect of an unprecedented
alliance whereby the status of art and religious or revealed truth could
be elevated on the back of epistemology.
By the time Biographia appeared in print in ļ±ļøļ±ļ¶, however, it was clear
that its transcendental deductions had failed to produce this outcome,
leaving Coleridge a great deal more sceptical about the ability of foun-
dational philosophy or ā˜ļ¬rst principleā™ to achieve all his aims. In this
respect, Biographia is a pivotal text in Coleridgeā™s career, for in it one
witnesses a collapse of conļ¬dence in the logocentric paradigm of foun-
dational thought, and the ļ¬rst emergence of an interest in dialectical
method which was to precipitate the abiding struggle of his later career:
namely, his attempt to reconcile the demands of apodeictic philosophy
with the ineffability of creation in art and religion. What went wrong?
To understand this, we need to be clearer about terminology, and in
particular the different meanings assigned by Kant and Coleridge to the
notion of a ā˜transcendental deductionā™.
ļ±ļµļø Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose

Transcendental knowledge is that by which we endeavour to climb above our
experience into its sources by an analysis of our intellectual faculties, still, how-
ever, standing as it were on the shoulders of our experience in order to reach at
truths which are above experience, while transcendent philosophy would con-
sist in the attempt to master a knowledge that is beyond our faculties [ . . .] of
objects therefore the existence of which, if they did exist, the human mind has
no means of ascertaining, and therefore has not even the power of imagining
or conceiving [ . . .].ā™ļ·ļ²

On ļ¬rst inspection, there is little here that would trouble Kant. How-
ever, Coleridge does not imagine that this exercise exhausts the task of
the philosopher. The title of the work is, after all, Logic, and not Logosophia:
and this reļ¬‚ects Coleridgeā™s attitude to Kantā™s epistemology as a neces-
sary propaedeutic to the total philosophy, or theosophy, but insufļ¬cient
in itself as a system. In a far less critical moment, he claims that to dis-
cover and explain ā˜any higher form of knowledge than that which results
from these very processes of the understanding [ . . .] is the express object
of transcendental researchā™, and indeed, that ā˜the distinction between
analytic and synthetic judgements [ . . .] is of small importance except
in the investigations of transcendental logic [ . . .]ā™.ļ·ļ³ Further, though
ā˜considered as logic it [Kantianism] is irrefragable; as philosophy it will
be exempt from opposition and cease to be questionable only when the
soul of Aristotle shall have become one with the soul of Plato, when the
men of talent shall have all passed into men of genius, or the men of genius
have all sunk into men of talent. That is, Graecis calendis, or when two
Fridays meet.ā™ļ·ļ“
These strains are already evident in Biographiaā™s attempt to ground
aesthetics in philosophy. Setting out the methodology for the Theses of
chapter ļ±ļ², Coleridge claims that ā˜[t]he science of arithmetic furnishes
instances, that a rule may be useful in practical application, and for the
particular purpose may be sufļ¬ciently authenticated by the result, be-
fore it has itself been fully demonstratedā™.ļ·ļµ This is the familiar Kantian
account of how mathematical reasoning is able to exceed experience
for the purpose of veriļ¬cation, according to which, the afļ¬rmation of
Y being the case is ā˜sufļ¬ciently authenticated by the resultā™ of it being
demonstrated as a condition of X, which we know a priori to be true.ļ·ļ¶
Such a method, Coleridge maintains, ā˜will be applied to the deduction
of the imagination, and with it the principles of production and of genial
ļ±ļ¶ļµ
Coleridge and the new foundationalism
criticism in the ļ¬ne artsā™. In the wake of the collapsed deduction, how-
ever, Coleridgeā™s deļ¬nition of art and poetry in Biographia is more ļ¬‚orid
than lucid. A clearer account is provided in the near-contemporary es-
say ā˜On Poesy or Artā™, in which he designates ā˜that species of poesy
which is not muta poesis by its usual name āpoetryāā™; giving art or poesy
generically

as of a middle quality between a thought and a thing, or, as I said before, the
union and reconciliation of that which is nature with that which is exclusively
human. It is the ļ¬gured language of thought, and is distinguished from nature
by the unity of all the parts in one thought or idea. Hence nature itself would
give us the impression of a work of art, if we could see the thought which is
present at once in the whole and in every part [ . . .].ļ·ļ·

Lecture ļ±ļ³ of Coleridgeā™s ļ±ļøļ±ļø course of Lectures on the Principles of
Judgement, Culture, and European Literature to the London Philosophical
Society, is associated with this essay. In Coleridgeā™s notes for this talk, he
writes that ā˜Art (I use the word collectively for Music, Painting, Statuary
and Architecture) is the Mediatress, the reconciliator of Man and Natureā™.
Indeed, ā˜Art itself might be deļ¬ned, as of a middle nature between a
Thought and a Thing [ . . .].ā™ļ·ļø By organic ļ¬guration of the dynamic
unity of manā™s consciousness and natureā™s unconscious being, then, art
imitates the beautiful in nature. ā˜What is beauty?ā™ Coleridge asks, answer-
ing: ā˜[i]t is, in the abstract, the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of
the diverse; in the concrete, it is the union of the shapely ( formosum) with
the vitalā™.ļ·ļ¹ Coleridgeā™s idea here that art can reveal to us a hidden, cre-
ative side of reality which consciousness could not otherwise grasp in
intellectual intuition recalls the early Schelling, as when he writes that
ā˜[t]he artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is
active through form and ļ¬gure, and discourses to us by symbols ā“ the
Natur-geist, or spirit of nature, as we unconsciously imitate those whom
we love [ . . .]ā™.ļøļ° In Biographia, however, poetry is rendered at once more
memorably and vaguely in terms as a ā˜spirit of unityā™; a ā˜synthetic and
magical powerā™, equated with ā˜imagination [ . . .] ļ¬rst put in action by the
will and understandingā™, which ā˜reveals itself in the balance or reconcil-
iation of opposite or discordant qualitiesā™, yet which ā˜still subordinates
art to nature [ . . .]ā™.ļøļ± The evasiveness of this effusion, its equivocation
between ā˜subordinationā™ and ā˜reconciliationā™, is the direct product of the
Biographiaā™s tension between epistemological foundationalism and indif-
ference, between transcendental method and the merger of method and
metaphysics.
ļ±ļ¶ļ¶ Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose
As with the ā˜principles of productionā™, so we ļ¬nd that the prospective
deduction of the principles of ā˜genial criticismā™ is placed under intoler-
able strain. Indeed, rather than being ā˜deducedā™, the principles of criti-
cism which Coleridge expounds in the second volume of Biographia are
inferred from psychological observation and generalisation. As Pfau
notes, on one level Coleridge had a ā˜fundamentally different intellec-
tual sensibilityā™ from Kant and Schelling, ā˜one far more inclined to start
out deductively, beginning with the micromanagement of empirical phe-
nomena, rather than descending from those remote and uncertain āstars
and nebulaeā of transcendent ideasā™.ļøļ² On the principle of poetic metre,
Coleridge writes: ā˜This I would trace to the balance in the mind effected
by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of
passion [ . . .] and how this balance of antagonists became organized into
metre (in the usual acceptation of that term) by a supervening act of the will
and judgement, consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure.ā™ļøļ³
In fact, one needs to look beyond Biographia itself to ļ¬nd Coleridgeā™s
clearest near-contemporary statement of critical principles; to the ļ±ļøļ±ļ“
ā˜Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticismā™. Here, he had offered a
slightly different deļ¬nition of poetry from that of the ļ±ļøļ±ļø ā˜On Poesy
or Artā™. ā˜All the Fine Artsā™, he writes, ā˜are different species of Poetry
[. . .]. The common essence of all consists in the excitement of emo-
tion for the immediate purpose of pleasure throā™ the medium of beauty;
herein contra-distinguishing poetry from science, the immediate object
and primary purpose of which is truth and possible utility.ā™ļøļ“ Coleridgeā™s
main purpose in these essays is to connect a Kantian thesis of the dis-
interestedness of aesthetic judgement of beauty, with a more substantive
Neoplatonic thesis (which Kant would have rejected) that beauty in art
is an intellectual apprehension of organic form. The third and most
complete of his principles, then, is that

This attempt to reconcile a Kantian, formalist aesthetic of disinterest-
edness with a metaphysical organicism which inevitably undermines the
division of form and content, disinterestedness and engagement, points